redbubble news

Redbubble shop users received an email from them today (20-04-23) informing us of changes to both the terms and conditions of having the account, and to introduce some new account level ‘tiers’.

For a moment reading this, I thought I could see what was coming next. “Hello,” I thought, “they’ll be charging us a percentage or a subscription to be using it I expect.”

I mean, that would make sense, yes?

But no, they surprised me. They’re proposing three account levels, Standard. Premium and a Pro.

Premium and Pro level users pay nothing.

But they’ll be charging the people who already sell the least amount of products, the Standard level users — I assume that the criteria is the amount of product you sell with them, but neither I or anyone else knows that for certain — a fee out of the profit margin they have made out of their sales. And, to save us the trouble of working out how much, they have provided many examples, none of which can be worked out to be anything as simple as ‘we’re having 30%‘… no, it’s a table of ‘flat’ fees charged on varying profit amounts that seem to be worked out on a ‘whatever we think we’ll get away with’ level.

A lot of those levels sail close to Redbubble helping themselves to nearly half of the profit margin that the artist was due for a fee. For example, if you make £4.00 – £4.99, they’ll have £1.85 thank you. So you’re left with £2.15 – 3.14 for a product that probably cost the customer about £25.00.

As it happens, spurred by the receipt of this email this morning, and having had to accept the terms and conditions before they would tell me what level I was on, I am apparently on the Premium level so I don’t have to pay them a portion of my meagre sales profit margins at all, but I have no idea how they arrived at that. They state that they can review your account and decide for themselves what level you are on. It is not clear when, how or who decides what level you are on, so it’s up to you to keep checking it I guess. Every month.

So, what does the artist and shop account holder get out of all this?

Well, they see no change whatsoever of course. They just potentially make less money out of a sale than they were used to. There is no benefit to artists, the extra money is for Redbubble, silly. They need it you know.

Does anyone have any idea how anyone on ‘Standard’ (paying Redbubble) gets to Premium (not paying Redbubble) or above?

No.

Redbubble has been my most successful shop by far previously, but I feel the principle of charging the lowest tier artists the most money is just arse-backwards. It’s Conservative government thinking.

I cannot continue to support a company that has this sort of mindset, so will be disabling my Redbubble account today and trying to remove any links to my work on it from this blog.

Even if they walk this back and reverse this decision after the level of complaints and negative feedback they are already getting on all the socials — and I would guess if you search ‘redbubble’ in the WordPress reader, particularly when the US wakes up to read their mail inboxes this morning, you’ll find many post like this one — I can’t support a company that lets this sort of flawed and mercenary decision to go through I don’t know how many levels of meetings and sign-offs, and to actually go live with it. Because, as is the modern way when faced with a customer revolt, they’ll grovel and say ‘We got it wrong, we’ll review the levels, we’ll do better’

Then they’ll introduce a new subscriptions scheme, and we’re all meant to say “Great, that’s cheaper than what they were going to do.” and be happy and applaud.

But I can’t be doing with all that shit.

I’m not made for what the internet has become, or the capitalist society in general really, and I’m tired of it.

Anyway, here’s a picture. You can buy it on my Pixels store if you like it.

For a while.